(View the previous episode here)

Tuesday

When the bullethound shuttle pulled into the parking lot behind the staging area, people were already in the midst of giving a shit.  I stepped off with a carrier full of black coffees, intent on not.  

Under my arm was my black saddle bag, which contained a tub full of sugar for the police commissioner’s cup and a copy of Vantrice Thomas’ most current dossier.  One of these things was mission critical, and that put a little bounce in my shuffle.  

As I moved towards the center of activity, a team of PPG mooks jogged past me, warfaces beaming through their protective helmets.  NBC+ gear for this?  Oh lord.  What in the world were they expecting in there?

Trying to ape a real New Yorker, I shrugged a bit in my bulky, fur-lined jacket—too big for my skinny self—and stepped into a tent that had been set up in the middle of the parking lot (maybe by the rat-faced members of some NYC tent-pitching-union?).  The glow from the slender monitors hit me immediately, as did the smell of donuts.  All but one of the screens displayed NYPD screensavers.  The active one, the biggest, framed a picture of a typical low-income housing complex, complete with two large towers and a few scattered trees that were bare for the winter.

The commissioner was seated in front of the array, and, incidentally, closest to the box of donuts.  He tipped his nondescript ball cap to me as our eyes met, then smiled and wriggled his portly frame out of the straining lawn chair.  He shook my hand firmly.  

We wasted no time getting down to business.  I parsed my bag for the sugar tub, handing him his two coffees at the same time, and he passed me a Boston creme.  While rooting around for the dossier, I noticed a copy of it sitting underneath the donut box.  I recognized Vantrice’s mug.  I gave up my efforts and set the bag down.

“Is that Dole Guldur?”  I tilted my head at the screen.

He flicked his eyes to the image briefly, then nodded.

There it was: the feared stronghold of Ded2Rites, in all of its Section 8 glory.

“You change your hair up, kid?”

“Uh, my,” I stumbled, not clearly remembering the last time I’d seen the old coot, “Yeah, it’s a new style.  Gotta be New York hip.”

He smiled, palming a couple cinnamon holes to shove into his maw.  

“I love New York.”

***

It was around noon when the PPG teams, flanked closely by a couple fearfully-armed police tactical units, pierced the outer defenses of Dole Guldur (which consisted of a locked, barricaded front door tagged with epithets and gang insignias).  Vantrice, as promised, was on hand to lead them through her cthulhuian tangle of extra-dimensional spaces that protected the premises.    

The commissioner, me, and a handful of curious city officials watched from our vulture’s nest of monitors, donuts, and paperwork.  

According to Vantrice, the young lady who had been captured was being held in this, the northernmost tower, with the southern one used mostly for storage.  The two towers had separate entrances, but stood shoulder to shoulder, and the gang had long ago knocked out the walls inside to connect them.

It was a kind of sad, but well-known, fact that many drug addicts found a temporary home in the dank alcoves of the southern tower, occasionally entering through its open door to shoot up and becoming lost in a maze of extra-dimensional spaces and their own substance-fueled delusions.  The gang actually encouraged this, because the folks who eventually died there (of ODs, starvation, or non-euclidean madness) became corpse-fodder for Rich Black Suit Taylor, the gang’s top dog.

In addition to having a really dumb fucking name—(Get it?  He makes black suits for people who die, and his name is Taylor.  He’s wealthy, too, because he kills LOTS of people.)—this 26-year-old kid was numero uno on the NYPD’s Gang Watch List, the only Category 3 hex offender in the New York Metropolitan Area.  

I’ve seen a few cases of necromancy.  Most of the offenders sent my way who had “the touch” could only reinvigorate small animals—insects, rodents, small canines at the very most—so the worst I’d personally dealt with up until then was undead dog fighting.  Taylor, being particularly gifted, could bring people back, albeit as mindless automatons.  He was a grower, though, meaning his power gained new facets as he aged.  His latest development, gained around the time of his 25th birthday: the ability to restore dead people with their mental faculties intact.  

A dude with a well-documented inferiority complex, Taylor was obsessed with success.  Particularly, academically successful black youth.  I’m not a psychiatrist, but I understand enough about the mentality that traps kids in the ghetto to know this: Taylor had real issues with education.  Maybe he had a learning disability, maybe he had missed some opportunities early on that haunted him, maybe his parents never gave a shit and let him play Nintendo when he should have been doing homework.  All of this fed into his gang persona—that of a “scholarly” necromancer—and guided his criminality.  

This criminality had taken a weird turn the previous summer (the summer city newspapers dubbed as “The Brain Drain”) when a bunch of honor students were murdered by Ded2Rites triggermen in broad daylight.  While the police shook the streets down trying to find the killers, their bodies were whisked away from morgue slabs and moved to Dole Guldur.  Cryptic notes left behind indicated that Taylor “had use for them.”  Was he building a Manhattan Project in the Bronx?  I doubt it.  But with Hope “Wardrobe” Williamson abducted that same summer, who knows?  

Wardrobe’s powers of creation, among some of the most extensive spatial manipulation abilities recorded anywhere, only worked when she was stressed out.  Like those precocious kids in books and movies, she created whole worlds to escape her bad life situations.  Except her worlds were real (and conveniently contained in pocket dimensions).  And, in her current state—captured, and likely tortured, by gang bangers—she was almost certainly always experiencing a “bad life situation.”

Who knows how much she had created thus far?

***

The PPGs finally reached their objective around quarter-till Agents of Shield.  My phone was already pointed towards ABC’s website.

Between quick glances, finger pinches, swipes and taps, I had caught sight of the tail end of their magical urban spelunking trip.

Dispatching the dozens of zombies that the gang had set up to watch their holding was a cakewalk for the PPGs (I heard that a few of the Stormtroopers from the NYPD even took down some of them), but the spatial navigation was … problematic.  

The hallway leading to Taylor’s quarters, a makeshift suite composed of two apartments merged by knocking a wall out, was a gauntlet of pointy implements.  Vantrice had somehow managed to clone a small staircase containing dirty heroin needles, and, through non-euclidean transformations, turn it into a space resembling a nightmarish Escher.  The girl clearly had some brains, I fully give her that, but this little trick scared the holy Hell out of the mooks and started a lengthy argument between their powered commanders.

Taylor’s crib was at the top (the bottom?) step of the stairs, and there was some debate as to how to best tackle the climb without getting poked by the probably hundreds of pieces of drug paraphernalia, particularly when one errant needle might potentially tumble downward (upward?) infinitely if stepped on.  Eventually, the commissioner stepped in, and, with my sleepy blessing, advised that Vantrice should help a few of the NBC+-suited mooks traverse the stairway slowly and clean up the needles as they went.  A bodybag was provided for this grim task.  Beyond Scared Straight?

“Orange looks good on you,” remarked one of the commanders—a Class 2 who juggled flame or something—as she helped Vantrice into some spare NBC+ gear.  I don’t remember clearly, but I’m sure I fist pumped.

Once that was done, there was a breach, followed by go-go-going, followed by boots stomping and then some fire exchanged.  I turned away at this point, mostly because I prefer banter to action, but I did hear of Taylor’s death.

“Taylor Wilkins,” someone said.  Now he in a black suit.  

The rear bedroom of the suite is where they found the [reanimated] bodies of the honor students that Taylor’s henchmen had absconded with.  They didn’t attack the intruding officers.  To say that they were cogent might have been a little much—I doubt Taylor was able to build atomic bombs with them—but they were damn sure sapient.  Weird.  On the commissioner orders, they were designated as “persons of interest” and escorted out for debriefing.  I honestly don’t know what they did with them after that.  

It took them a whole hour to locate Wardrobe’s portal (and subsequently, the girl herself).  My show was over, so I was about as attentive as could be expected for that time in the evening.  

Williamson herself was OK.  I mean, as OK as anyone in that situation could be expected to be.  But she had, obviously, created a great deal.

This led to the second long argument of the night.  

Apparently, inside the portal—an inconspicuously placed extra-dimensional rift accessed through a closet filled with boxes of Taylor’s six-hundred dollar sneakers—there was an area the size of a small town.  

And it had people in it.  

When I say “people,” let me be clear: I don’t have a damn clue as to what they were.  Some looked like elves?  Some were obviously monstrous and seemed to leer at officers as they got close.  Some were talking lanterns.  Christ Jesus.  

I didn’t like philosophy when I took it in college.  I don’t read any philosophers.  Honestly, I stay quiet when people bring up philosophical subjects.  I think it’s bullshit.  So, as you can guess, the next few hours were a Dante’s Inferno for me as everyone from the high school (maybe) educated mooks, to the commanders, to the goddamn Commissioner of the NYPD opined about what these things—which certainly had many people-like characteristics—were.  

At 11:03, the dominant school of thought was that they were living people and that the City of New York was now responsible for all three-hundred and five of them.  By 12:53, when I was as glazed as the last donuts in the vulture’s nest, they were “extra-sensory constructs”—a term coined a few minutes earlier—and had to be destroyed immediately, on site.  The bleary-eyed commissioner almost gave his nod of approval.  Career feels stopped him, I imagine.

When I was catching the late-late night bullethound back to Chapel Hill, sometime around 3:15, a PhD of some kind was being shaken out of her comfy bed in the Upper East Side to deal with the situation.  That’s what I heard anyway, via a sleep deprived text message from Vantrice that rattled my pocket as I was unlocking my apartment door.

“ms sagann,” she mashed, “we gonna b up all nite fucking w/ this shit!!”

Not me, I thought, texting her back with some quip about honoring commitments that I found on BrainyQuote.  

Nope.  I’ll be asl—